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Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land
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About This Book
"I am a child of the American West, a landscape so rich and wide that my culture trembles with terror before its power." So begins Taylor Brorby's Boys and Oil, a haunting, bracingly honest memoir about growing up gay amidst the harshness of rural North Dakota, "a place where there is no safety in a ravaged landscape of mining and fracking." In visceral prose, Brorby recounts his upbringing in the coalfields; his adolescent infatuation with books; and how he felt intrinsically different from other boys. Now an environmentalist, Brorby uses the destruction of large swathes of the West as a metaphor for the terror he experienced as a youth. From an assault outside a bar in an oil boom town to a furtive romance, and from his awakening as an activist to his arrest at the Dakota Access Pipeline, Boys and Oil provides a startling portrait of an America that persists despite well-intentioned legal protections.
Reviews
"A great memoir, however, renders moments wholly outside of the reader's experience in ways that evoke emotion and understanding."
"In the process, he offers a beautiful and complex look at how one can grow in the most unlikely places."
"In the end, he writes, 'I no longer feel ashamed for the person I am,' a realization hard won over the course of a well-crafted narrative ..."
"Brorby writes movingly ..."
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